History of Wonder

Where do we look for wonder? Where have we looked? And what is the history of those places? For the first time, I’m thinking about a chronology, or at least a series: Renaissance cabinets of curiosities, Burke on the sublime, the Romantic inward turn, Freud as the last Romantic. In other words, get students thinking about the fact that different arenas of wonder open themselves at different times. Wonder depends upon an elusiveness–pin something down too tightly and the wonder ceases–but our sense of what is elusive changes with time. Some time in the eighteenth century, for instance, childhood begins to be a source of wonder–not with Locke but with Rousseau, and with that change eventually we arrive at a wondering (and wandering) Proust. We need to think about the relationship of wonder and the sublime: they are related, but not synonymous, since the sublime can threaten to overwhelm the playful, interactive quality of wonder.